painting: Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners (1857) painting: Edward H. Corbould, Hetty and Captain Donnithorne in Mrs. Poyser's Dairy James Scott is a scholar who has shed more light on the mentality and agency of rural people than almost any other since the reinvigoration of peasant studies in the 1970s. Scott's book The Moral Economy of …
Norms and deliberative rationality
Why do people cooperate? That is, what motivates individuals to come together to share labor and resources in pursuit of a common good from which they cannot be excluded -- fighting fires, hunting marauding tigers, cleaning up a public beach? Standard rational choice theory, and its application to problems of individual rationality in group settings, …
Everyday social interactions
It is apparent that there are patterns in the ordinary social interactions between individuals in various societies. Whether and how to greet an acquaintance or a stranger, how close people stand together, how loudly people speak, what subjects they turn to in idle social conversation, how conflict is handled -- all of these topics and …
Habits, plans, and improvisation
How does thought figure in our ordinary actions and plans? To what extent are our routine actions the result of deliberation and planning, and to what extent do we function on auto-pilot and habit? It is clear that much of one's daily activity is habitual: routine actions and social responses that reflect little internal deliberation …
Social agency and rational choice
One of the reasons that rational choice theory (RC) is appealing is that it is an agent-centered approach to social explanation: explain the social outcome on the basis of an analysis of the beliefs, intentions, and circumstances of the individual agents who make up the social setting. What rational choice theory adds to this description …
Comparative life satisfaction
We tend to think of the past century as being a time of great progress when it comes to the quality of life -- for ordinary people as well as the privileged. Advances in science, technology, and medicine have made life more secure, predictable, productive, educated, and healthy. But in what specific ways is ordinary …
Is there such a thing as human nature?
People often make claims about "human nature." For example -- "It is a part of human nature to be egoistic." "Human beings are naturally acquisitive." "Cooperation is a natural human instinct." "Human nature defines the way we learn language." "Violence is natural." What would human nature look like? To start with a preliminary definition, we …
Mental life
We are all persons with thoughts, desires, emotions, memories, and awareness. In some sense we have first-hand knowledge of all this -- we are the ones who experience the situation of going through a difficult job interview, of feeling angry at an aggressive driver, of trying to decide what to do in a moment of …
What to do?
Decision makers at every level are perplexed by the turbulence created by the current financial crisis. Everyone is acting under great uncertainty -- business owners, state governors, the Department of the Treasury, the presidential candidates, and university officials. And yet today's actions may have enormous effects on the business, the non-profit organization, the family, or …
Trust
What is the role of trust in ordinary social workings? I would say that a fairly high level of trust is simply mandatory in any social group, from a family to a workplace to a full society. Lacking trust, each agent is forced into a kind of Hobbesian calculation about the behavior of those around …
Understanding Society 